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After formatting with InitDisk, an 8GB Kingston DataTraveller "100 G2" drive reports zero size and cannot be read by Windows 10.

I have a 2012-vintage Kingston USB flash drive. I recently used it to create a Linux boot disk, with the Rufus utility. And that worked fine.
But Win10 couldn't read the drive anymore.
So, I tried to recover it with GRC's InitDisk utility.
And InitDisk worked fine. I ran it under Win10, with "Run as administrator", I plugged in the drive, InitDisk identified the drive, and formatted the drive.

But, after formatting with InitDisk, the drive isn't recognized as storage media anymore.
InitDisk no longer recognizes the drive when it's plugged in.
Win10 takes a long time (just over 20 seconds) to assign the drive a letter after it's plugged in.
When it does assign a drive letter, the drive shows up with zero size.
And the "INITDISK" volume label is not present on the drive.

So, the two questions are:
#1: What's up with this?
And, #2: How can I recover the drive?

(My traditional answer to #2 has been: Plug it in to a Linux system and use gparted to blow away the partition table and write a new one.
But, I'll hold off on that in case any other InitDisk/SpinRite users find this case interesting.)

I'm attaching several screenshots. These are:
Win10 drive Properties, showing zero size.
Device Manager's Device Properties view of the drive, showing that it's populated with one, zero MB volume.
DiskPart (Win10's new replacement for fdisk), showing listings of my drives and volumes (note: no volume label on the USB drive).
DiskPart's "detail disk" output, showing "Status: No Media".
DiskPart's "detail volume" output, showing "Virtual Disk Service error: There is no media in the device."

Those strike me as very strange errors. This drive does not have removable media. It is a removable drive, with fixed flash media.

Any advice? Any additional diagnostics I should collect?

Let me know...

It looks like something in the file system format got corrupted. Also, the flash drive is now 8 years old. It could be just starting to die by now, depending on the build quality and how much it's been used.

Did you use InitDisk 5.0 (the latest)?

DanR, yeah, I used the latest. Freshly downloaded tonight. R5.

JulioHM, The drive hasn't seen a lot of use. It sat idle for about 7 years, "archiving" an old Ubuntu 11-era bootable installer.
I bought several identical drives at that time. The others all appear to be in good health.
So, I have the opportunity to try InitDisk again, with another drive of the same type.
But, before I do that, I'd like some assurance that it won't brick the next drive, too...

I think it very very unlikely that InitDisk harmed your USB flash drive. It seems likely that your UBS drive simply died at this time.

For the past 8 months or so I have been a participant in the AHCI/InitDisk/ReadSpeed development activity over in the development newsgroup. There have been *NO* instances of any of this activity damaging a USB flash drive. There have been instances of InitDisk not always working properly. After Steve figured out why and made the necessary tweaks to his code, the result was a new release of InitDisk (and an improved ReadSpeed). Hence we are at InitDisk 5.0 today.

I would suggest giving @Steve a chance to see and respond to this thread.

@Sam4Squirrel one thing to try is to see if something like Rufus will format it and recover it.

It does sound like a hardware issue however.

@Sam4Squirrel : Thanks for posting such truly useful data about your situation. I have to agree with DanR and DarkwinX on this one. Thanks to your posting the output of DISKPART. There's no way that anything written to the drive could cause it to show 0 bytes of physical size since that's coming from a level below any data contained on the drive.

I strongly dislike coincidences, since I tend not to believe in them, and they are impossible to prove. But in this case, I think that it was a coincidence that it was while using InitDisk that the drive decided that it would rather be inert.

DarkwinX said:

@Sam4Squirrel one thing to try is to see if something like Rufus will format it and recover it.

It does sound like a hardware issue however.

Click to expand...

Rufus doesn't show the drive in its "Device" dropdown list, even after Win10 assigns it a drive letter.

Update:
The drive shows signs of life.

I've done nothing to it since Wednesday. So, I certainly didn't fix the thing.
I put my Win10 laptop through a couple hibernate/restore cycles. But I haven't rebooted it.

And, today, Win10 shows my thumb drive in Explorer, with the expected "INITDISK R5" volume name.
Today, Rufus knows that it's an 8GB device.

But, right-clicking on it in the left-hand Navigation pane of an Explorer window crashes Explorer.
All of my open Explorer windows vanish. And my task bar "blinks" out of existence and reappears.
I've learned that this is what it looks like when Explorer crashes under Win10. And it's 100% repeatable.

Very strange behavior.
Could this just be the vicissitudes of Windows 10?
Was Windows Explorer also just that done with 2020, that it was waiting for the new year to read my drive?
Or, maybe the drive hardware is flaking out, after all.

Rufus successfully reformatted the drive and installed its built-in "FreeDOS" image.
After that, I could browse the drive in Windows Explorer.

But, even after a reboot, a right-click on any item in any Explorer window's Nagivation pane immediately crashes Explorer.
That happens whether the drive is plugged in or not.

Whatever this is, it doesn't appear related to InitDisk.

Thanks to all of you for reading.

Sam4Squirrel said:

Whatever this is, it doesn't appear related to InitDisk.

Click to expand...

That is true. The drive has died. Toss it!

@Sam4Squirrel : Thanks for your follow-ups. Much appreciated!